PS5 Pro Delivers 30% Performance Boost with Minimal Increase in Power Usage Compared to Base Model

Digital Foundry recently put the PlayStation 5 Pro through its paces to analyze its power usage, and the results were unexpected. In a lively discussion on YouTube, Richard Leadbetter, John Linneman, and Oliver Mackenzie revealed that, despite the Pro’s more muscular GPU, it doesn’t demand much more electricity than the original PS5.

The team assessed the PS5 Pro’s performance with games like Elden Ring, Spider-Man 2, and F1 24. They compared these results to both the original PS5 and its Slim variant, noting how the Pro version leveraged its graphical enhancements in the titles designed to take advantage of it.

Elden Ring was particularly telling, as the PS5 Pro’s power draw was very similar to that of the PS5 Slim. At one point in their test, the Pro clocked in at 214.1 watts, just slightly less than the Slim at 216.2 watts and a bit more than the Launch model at 201.3 watts. The frame rates, however, told a different story, with the Pro running at a smooth 52 FPS, compared to the Slim’s 40 FPS and the launch model’s 37 FPS. Interestingly, while the Pro offered around 30% better performance, its power needs were pretty much on par with the Slim.

In Spider-Man 2, they observed a different pattern since all three consoles capped at 60 FPS. Here, the Pro used the most power, pulling 232 watts compared to the Slim’s 218.2 watts and the original’s 208.1 watts. Yet, the extra juice didn’t translate to frame rate gains due to the 60 FPS lock. As for F1 24, while missing direct comparisons, the Pro was steady at about 235 watts in-game.

It’s worth noting that the apparent power differences among the launch model and Slim are partly due to variations in silicon quality, which can lead to different power efficiencies at the same clock speeds.

Digital Foundry’s experiments underscored that the PS5 Pro keeps its power consumption remarkably aligned with previous models despite its vastly superior GPU. This was a pleasant surprise, given expectations that it might draw over 300 watts.

Under the hood, the PS5 Pro boasts an 8-core Zen 2 CPU and a 16.7 TFLOP RDNA-based GPU, supported by 576 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Meanwhile, the standard PS5 units, although sharing the same CPU, have a less potent 10.28 TFLOP GPU and 448 GB/s of memory bandwidth.